Welcome to The OuterSpark, here I make sense of the space industry one week at a time: what's being built, who's building it, and how you get in!
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UK Solar Eclipse Event! 🚀
I want to say thank you properly to all of you. Because a lot of you turned up to see the Solar Eclipse this week! You watched my videos, and a fair few of you messaged afterwards with photos.
The thing I keep thinking about is that people took my word on the safety stuff. That's not a small thing to hand someone. Eye damage from looking at the Sun is silent and permanent, and I was very aware while writing that guide that getting it slightly wrong would have real consequences for real people. So I checked everything twice against the Royal Observatory and the American Astronomical Society rather than trusting my own memory.
Solar Eclipse 2026, Guildford, Surrey.
That's the standard I want to hold for anything I put out. If it's a big event, I'll do the work properly. If I'm not sure about something, I'll say so. But in the process, most of my videos went viral and I was overwhelmed by the trust that everyone put on me. So thank you again!
A few of you asked me "how did you actually end up getting into the space sector?" So that's this week's issue.
How I got into the space sector 🪐
I'm writing this out honestly, including the bits that didn't work, because the tidy version you see on LinkedIn is useless to anyone trying to copy it.
My placement year at The National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, UK.
It started with physics, not space. I did a Masters in Physics with Satellite Technology at Surrey University. But the actual driver wasn't rockets. I was just deeply curio
us about how the world works, and satellite tech was the corner of physics I found most fascinating. I oftern found that deep curiosity and geniune interest about something leads to an accelerated learning in any field.
By this point I'd worked out something uncomfortable: I didn't want to be an engineer! I was running the Physics scoiety few years back and the thing I loved most was the interaction with people.
I liked being in the rooms, the conversations, and the interesting deals. I wanted to build my own thing rather than optimise someone else's subsystem. Realising that early saved me about five years of being mediocre at a job I'd have resented. So I stayed back one more year to complete my MSc Entrepreneurship course to learn about business and accounting.
Straight out of university, I went and sold software at a marketing tech company, for a year. Nothing to do with space. I took it deliberately, because I'd noticed that I could talk about technology but I couldn't sell anything, and sales is a learnable skill that nobody teaches you at university. This was mostly a cold call job, which was humbling, and sometimes excruciating. But this taught be everything about grit, perseverance and being ok to hear ‘no’. However, the entire time I was there I was scanning for a way into space.
Then a weekend hackathon changed everything! London, first space tech hackathon of its kind, sponsored by Techstars. I turned up not knowing anyone, met a group of genuinely brilliant people, and we formed a team.
TechStars Powering Space Hackathon Final Pitch.
We started on asteroid mining, because of course we did! Then a mentor made an offhand comment about how small satellites are fundamentally limited by power, and we pivoted the whole idea to how could we wirelessly beam power in space. We pitched on the Sunday and came second runner up!
That weekend is the hinge of my entire career. Everything after it traces back to a room I walked into alone. I wasn’t ready for it but I am glad I had the courage to walk the path!
We turned it into a company. Space Power Ltd, four of us, formed on the back of that weekend. We won a feasibility contract with Surrey University, working with a professor of mine who had done wireless power transfer work with the European Space Agency, and proved the concept was viable.
One of my co-founders was a senior manager at Airbus Defence and Space, and needed help with sales and marketing for their satellite testing facility.
Airbus Steveange Mars Simulation Yard.
He offered me contract work while I built Space Power on the side. That contract was the actual door. Not the degree, not the company. A person who knew me from a weekend, who needed something I could do. However, the contract work was coming to an end and we started hearing rumours of a potential virus break out…
When everthing started going well, COVID hit! And with that all revenues and prospects on raising money were gone. I had to make a painful decision to step down and find other sources of income.
So I joined another space startup, this one in a novel communications technology creating software defined ground stations (things that you need to communicate with satellites).This was an intensive period in my life, and I led end-to-end sales, marketing and participating multiple accelerator programmes. We were part of the prestigeous Seraphim Space Accelerator, where we were joined by increadible space startups from the UK and US (one of which has recently raised $100m dollars). We won a joint UK Ministry of Defence and US Department Of Defnce contract delivered through the Starburst accelerator, and I ended up pitching in front of some of the most senior defence leaders across the Five Eyes nations. That was the moment I stopped being someone who'd wandered into space and became someone who belonged there.
However, as with all innovation focused startups, if you are not able to raise money quickly or have high paying customers, the risk starts compounding. That’s exactly what happend to this company, and unfortunately even with all the ‘successses’ it didn’t work out.
After this I spent a while at an agency helping other deep tech companies in oil and gas, autonomany and sustainability sectors. However, I realised that space is where my hear is at, and eventually led me to Satellite Applications Catapult, where I led their flagship incubator and accelerator programme. I was eventually got promoted to Senior Business Strategy Consultant, working with genuinely novel, bleeding-edge companies in UK and Europe who are working at niche technologies like in-orbit servicing and manufacturing, biopharma manufacturing in space, maritime connectivity and other facinating topics.
Access to Finance 2024 Event panelist.
I’ve been at the Catapult for three years but deep in my heart I always wanted to go back into the hustle of entrepreshuership. Since April 2026 this year, I’ve gone solo and working with clients to solve their space sector commercial problems.
It’s been eight years, and now I'm here writing to you!
What I'd actually tell you from all that
Three things, and I'll keep them short:
The non-space job was not wasted time. Selling marketing software taught me the thing that made me employable in space. The sector is full of people who understand the technology and can't communicate it, sell it, or fund it. If you're stuck outside looking in, going and getting genuinely good at a commercial skill is not a detour. It's leverage.
Show up to the thing where you don't know anyone. Hackathons, meetups, conference fringe events. My entire career came out of one weekend where I arrived alone. You cannot plan this, you can only increase the number of rooms you're in.
The route in is almost always a person, not an application. My door was a co-founder who needed sales help. Not a job board. If you're only applying through portals, you're competing in the most crowded possible channel.
If you want the systematic version of all this, it's in the UK Space Sector Playbook, which is free to download and covers who funds what and where the actual entry points are.
Three things from this week 💡
NASA is asking what it doesn't know about living on the Moon. The Human Research Program has opened a call asking researchers to submit the questions they think need answering as missions shift from short visits to long stays
NASA has invited India to join its Moon Base programme. The invitation came at ISRO's headquarters in Bengaluru during the ninth US-India Civil Space Joint Working Group. India signed the Artemis Accords in 2023 as the 27th signatory, and the coalition now runs to 70 nations.
Virgin Galactic has pushed its return to flight again. The company hasn't reached space since June 2024. Its first commercial flight on the new Delta class vehicle has slipped to February, with the CEO saying no single problem caused it, just hundreds of small installation tasks each taking slightly longer than planned.
Upcoming Deadlines & Events
If you're working on getting into space, or building something in it, here are some upcoming deadlines that you should know of:
Deadlines
UK: UK Space Agency C-LEO Call 3, Stage One closes midday Monday 7 September. £42m for satellite comms tech.
Europe: ESA Future Navigation Demonstrators, open call. Ideas in before 30 September for the next selection round.
US: NSF America's Seed Fund, full proposals 4 November. You need an invited Project Pitch first, which takes one to two months, so pitch now.
US: NASA SBIR/STTR, rolling topic batches through to September 2027. Sign up for alerts.
India: IN-SPACe Seed Fund (up to ₹1 crore) and Technology Adoption Fund. Open in batches, so register on the portal and watch.
Events
Space for Inspiration (ESA): 1 to 2 September, Copenhagen
UK Earth Observation Conference : 15 to 17 September, University of Warwick
UK Space Power Conference: 23 and 24 September, IET Savoy Place, London
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Till next time!
Ricky
